October 2, 2009

Alright, let me first say that my employer, the Missouri Department of Conservation, doesn’t have a position called, “UI Designer”. That’s not how jobs are typically named in government. However, we’ve been luck enough to have a team of folks who are UI designers. They just also often have other tasks on their plates as well — updating content on the web, for example. But now we’re filling a new position for UI designer and that’s pretty much their whole job.

For those of you who want to cut to the chase, the job applications close Oct. 15th and here’s the link:

There are clear reasons why you’d want a UI designer. The first and main one is this: You just can’t easily build applications in an iterative fashion, incorporate user feedback on usability and keep your timeline unless you follow a strategy of splitting out your content from your presentation via XHTML/CSS. To do that effectively, you have to have a UI designer.

I’m not going to waste space explaining all the details on this. The main reason being that many people have already done so. Take a moment to read these blogs regarding good Web design:

As I’m getting ready to co-present on the use of social media in government, I’ve realized the possibly the best example of how government should engage social media can be found with the Air Force.

Take a look at their publication, New Media and the Air Force. For one thing, the publication is a great primer on many of the terms used in social media. However, the following three observations made in the publication strike me as important when it comes to social media:

The Air Force encourages Airmen to use it.

All Airmen (not just PR folks) are communicators.

If the Air Force doesn’t tell its story, someone else will.

This isn’t just lip service. As David Meerman Scott pointed out in a blog post in 2008, the Air Force is actively engaging and training their staff to use social media. Capt. David Faggard, Chief of Emerging Technology for the Air Force, has even created a handy little flowchart that anyone could use to guide staff on how to engage social media.

One of the big issues government agencies make for not using social media is that they have no available staff. However, look at what the Air Force is doing. They’ve realized that social media depends on individuals with different social networks. Social media is often a personal exchange of information. This means you have to use everyone in your agency.

The key is training them on what social media is and how they can use it. Then empower them to use it.

Actually, many government agencies are. This week I’ll share what I know about government agencies using social media such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter as I finish preparations for the upcoming GovTech Minnesota Digital Government Summit.

As I’m preparing, however, you might be able to help. If you’re in government and you don’t think you’re using social media as much as you might……why? What are the main hurdles standing in your way?

Hurdles I’ve heard include:

We don’t have staff who we can dedicate to it.

It’s too expensive to develop.

It’s a security risk.

We don’t want our agency to get into social media (because we don’t know alot about it, can’t control it, etc.)

Our Internet use policies won’t allow us.

Drop me a line or add a comment if you have additional ones or if you think one of the above is particularly significant.

The main take away points of the podcast? That you should view Twitter as going to a cocktail party. Ask yourself why you’re going. If it’s to keep yourself networked and out there, going to a party (or using Twitter) might be one of the easiest ways to do so.

The system interfaces with the Twitter api so that you an create a poll and send folks to that poll via Twitter. The poll not only keeps track of the breakdown of your poll but also provides for comments as each person responds.

March 6, 2009

Back in Sept. of 2008, Google launched the Google Moderator. What does Google Moderator do? When Google has tech talks or company-wide meetings, it lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

The launch in September opened that to a larger audience and, thus, larger set of questions. Anyone can submit questions to be voted on. It also appears that you can target locations (like the state of Missouri, example) for viewers.

So, I open Moderator and see that the second question listed is, “How Can We Eliminate Wasteful Spending?” I click there and find Senator Claire McCaskill. Senator McCaskill’s question has gotten voted high enough that it’s showing up (at least on this Missourian’s page) at one of the top 5 questions.

I’m still learning about Moderator myself, but it seems that it certainly has potential to help government officials and agencies learn what questions interest the public.

March 2, 2009

Ok, these aren’t just for government. They’re for anyone forced to work without a budget and limited staff.

One of these are for online collaboration with staff. The other is a great tool for quickly building slick online applications (and you don’t even have to much about how to build applications). All of them are free (although some provide more features for a fee).

This site gives you a great tool for building mind maps. If you’re not familiar with how mind mapping is done, check out this video on YouTube.

Even if you don’t use the site, it’s interesting to view various mind maps that other users have published to get ideas on how to more effectively use mind maps.

Zoho Creator

Zoho, of course, provides a whole suite of office productivity tools that are freely available. The Creator, however, allows you to build or use prebuilt web applications that can collect and manage data for you. Again, YouTube provides a video overview of what you can do with this tool.

March 1, 2009

Like many people, I circle the flame that is GTD (Getting Things Done) as a productivity practice. I do it awhile, get lax, and come back…each time getting a little better at the practice.

This time around, I realized that GTD provides a common framework that you can apply to many areas in your life. In other words, once you’ve settled on your basic categories you use to organized things, there’s not reason why you can’t apply them to many different places where you process information.

In less than an hour, I had not only cleared my desktop, but also had all Firefox bookmarks organized into 10 handy categories in the toolbar. What made it all go so fast was that I found that I was able to organized the bookmarks and the applications in terms of various roles I play (read GTD to understand what a role is).

Follow up on Windows Live Writer: I’m not sold on the product. Perfect for publishing to my blog.